Capital taxation, long-run growth, and bequests

It has been shown that higher capital taxes can have a growth-enhancing effect when combined with a revenue-compensating cut in wage taxes or with an expansion in productivity-increasing public services. The present paper demonstrates that these results critically hinge on the existence of a bequest motive. It is shown that a wage-tax cut is no longer growth-enhancing when bequests are operative. By way of contrast, increasing productive public services may well boost growth. The theoretical findings are illustrated by numerical simulations based on US data.     

新公共管理运动背景下税收管理的国际比较及对中国的启示

20世纪70年代末80年代初,伴随着经济上新自由主义思潮的兴起和信息技术革命的浪潮,西方国家掀起了一场新公共管理运动。新公共管理运动给西方国家税收管理方式带来了巨大变化,并对税收征纳成本的有效控制起到了积极作用,本文总结他国经验,以期从发达国家税收管理制度设计和安排上得到一些解决我国目前问题的有益借鉴。     

我国财政改革中几个全局性问题的思考

按照党的"十六大"提出的战略构想,未来20年里我们将完成经济体制转轨的任务,实现全面小康.这样的构想意味着,中国经济体制改革目标的实现已从政策设计的角度锁定在1978-2020年的时段内,我们正处在承前启后的转折点上.在政府主导的渐进路径上,政府既推进着市场机制的建立,也同时推动着计划手段的创新,在市场机制发挥作用的同时,又始终承担着计划体制下的诸多任务与责任.财政作为政府政策实施的财力保障,以自身的变动见证了这一过程,与体制转轨进程和经济运行状况有着深刻的互动关系.因此,在这样一个特殊时刻,对财政改革中的一些关系全局的问题进行思考、解释,不仅关系到财政自身的运行,无疑也将直接影响到整个经济发展的绩效.本文主要围绕三个方面的重大问题提出了分析的路径与依据,并做出了基本的评价.     

Aging: Some Pleasant Fiscal Arithmetic

Projections of age-related public expenditure growth have raised widespread concerns about fiscal sustainability. This paper examines how total expenditure would develop under four policy rules on public expenditure growth. Some simple arithmetic of expenditure, GDP, and population is reviewed and applied in simulations for 19 OECD countries over 2000–50. A general and a specific conclusion arise from the results. Generally, long-term expenditure projections could benefit from revisiting common assumptions on non-age-related expenditure growth. Specifically, realistic gradual adjustment in non-age-related expenditures could go a long way towards maintaining fiscal sustainability under age-related spending pressures.

The Costs of Increasing Transparency

In their seminal paper, Morris and Shin (Amer Econ Rev 92(5): 1521–1534, 2002a) argued that increasing the precision of public information is not always beneficial to social welfare. Svensson (Amer Econ Rev 96: 448–451, 2006) however has disputed this by saying that although feasible, the conditions for which this was true, were not all that likely. In that respect, therefore, increasing ‘transparency’ remains most of the times beneficial to social welfare. In this paper, we extend the Morris and Shin attempt by setting it up as an explicit interactive game between the Central Bank, the objectives of which we model explicitly, and the private sector. We show that in the absence of costs, both players benefit from transparency in the manner described previously in the literature, and point the differences in their gains. Following that, we then introduce the fact that increasing transparency comes at some costs and show how both players face incentives to free ride on each other as a result. The presence of costs thus alters the way in which greater transparency is attained.

论行为公共政策及其在财政治理中的应用:逻辑、案例与对策

行为公共政策尚处于全球学术研究的前沿领域,而其应用特别值得中国中等收入发展阶段财政治理的重视和探讨。本文首先论述了行为经济理论四个阶段的发展逻辑,并对每个阶段进行了简要述评。基于理论逻辑所揭示的从"经济人"到"人类"的假设条件变化,在对公共政策进行简要回顾的基础上,本文阐述了行为经济为其带来的改变,并对行为政策与传统政策进行了比较分析。接着,在提出行为政策的五点特征及其对财政治理的启示后,本文较详细阐述了行为政策在全球实践的典型案例,并在最后为中国当下财政治理提出了五个方面的对策建议。     

西部地区民营经济发展财政支持对策与思考——以四川省达州市为例

改革开放以来,我国民营企业蓬勃发展,民营经济由小到大、由弱变强,在稳定增长、促进创新、增加就业等方面发挥了重要作用,已成为推动我国国民经济发展的重要力量.但是,随着外部环境的深刻变化和受到国内经济下行等多重因素的影响,我国民营企业,尤其是西部欠发达地区的民营企业普遍面临着成本增高、终端市场受限、融资难融资贵、税费负担重等发展瓶颈制约问题.如果这些困难和问题长期得不到有效解决,将会严重影响民营企业的健康发展和阻碍民营经济的快速发展.财政是国家治理的基础和重要支柱.财政部门要充分发挥职能作用,积极支持民营企业健康发展,要以降税减费为主攻方向,减轻民营企业发展中的压力,帮助民营企业做大做强,实现民营经济高质量发展.本课题以四川省达州市为例,提出财政部门支持民营经济发展"1234"工作思路和对策措施,积极推动民营经济发展动力强起来、发展质量高起来、发展速度快起来,为达州加快实现"两个定位"和争创全省经济副中心做出积极贡献.     

Ethnic identities,public spending and political regimes

Do democracies discriminate less against minorities as compared to non-democracies? How does the dominance of an ethnic group affect discrimination under various political regimes? We build a theory to analyse such questions. In our model, political leaders (democratically elected or not) decide on the allocation of spending on different types of public goods: a general public good and an ethnically-targetable public good which benefits the majority ethnic group while imposing a cost on the other minorities. We show that, under democracy, lower ethnic dominance leads to greater provision of the general public good while higher dominance implies higher provision of the ethnically-targetable good. Interestingly, the opposite relation obtains under dictatorship. This implies that political regime changes can favour or disfavour minorities based on the ambient level of ethnic dominance. Several historical events involving regime changes can be analysed within our framework and are consistent with our results.     

THE IMPACT OF GREATER AUTONOMY ON EFFICIENCY OF WORK AND QUALITY OF SERVICES IN PUBLIC SERVICE PROVIDERS: A CASE OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS

ABSTRACT: The paper analyses impact of greater autonomy on efficiency of work and quality of services in public service institutions. Autonomy is one of the key principles of New Public Management that, according to the theory, increases performance in public service providers. However this assumption has been scarcely researched in practice. To narrow this gap, the experimental reform that implemented greater managerial and financial autonomy in 13 Lithuanian state vocational schools was chosen for research. In order to analyse the impact of autonomy after the reform, maximally similar institutions (those that underwent the reform and that did not) are compared using quantitative (incl. counterfactual analysis) and qualitative methods. The results indicate that institutions that have been reformed tend to have better efficiency and quality of services, even though this relationship is not causal. Moreover, the research challenges the notion that such results came from greater autonomy. Finally, the logic of the NPM of as to why more autonomous institutions perform better is also challenged.     

政府公共工程招投标腐败举报研究

政府公共工程招投标领域内,参与投标人为达到自身的某种目的常常采取行贿等非法手段。这种腐败违法行为不仅严重败坏了社会风气,且给政府公共工程建设带来极大破坏。消除这种行为,除了需要相应的监管部门付出很多努力外,与招投标违法举报人的举报积极性密切相关,举报人提供的线索在查处腐败案件中起关键的作用。充分发挥举报人的积极性,是查处腐败案件的重要突破口,也是做好工程建设预防寻租腐败等发生的重点和难点。该文从政府公共工程招投标腐败举报问题出发。从举报人是否属于当事人的角度进行分类,研究了它们的异同点,并对举报人与被举报人之间利益进行博弈分析,在此基础上提出了完善政府公共工程招投标腐败举报制度的途径。得出结论是,提高举报人积极性的努力方向有两条：其一是降低举报人的举报风险;此外就是增加举报人在举报活动中的预期收益。